The Dynanmics of AbortionAttitudes: Poland and the United States.

In this paper, we seek to describe, explain, and compare attitudes toward abortion in the United States and Poland over time. While our preliminary results suggest that abortion attitudes have remained quite stable in both countries, this result is somewhat perplexiing. Numerous demographic and cultural changes have taken place in both countries which would normally be expected to push the population in a pro-choice direction. We plan to compare the actual distributions of abortion attitudes for both countries with a set of expected values. The latter will be computed by assuming constant relationships between the dependent variable and important predictors of abortion attitudes,while allowing the marginal distributions of such variables to change over time. Based on these comparisons, we hope to account fot the reasonf or the anomalous stability of abortion attitudes in the two nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]